Historian recounts Medford African American journalist's role in integration of baseball

Friday

Feb 15, 2013 at 12:01 AMFeb 15, 2013 at 3:17 PM

Mabray “Doc” Kountze was different than most sportswriters. Although he was the first African-American to receive press credentials from the Boston Red Sox, in 1934, he rarely chronicled the home runs and shutouts of Fenway Park ballgames.

Ken Krause/medford@wickedlocal.com

Jay Hurd is different than many serious baseball researchers, who tend to pore over box scores and statistics seeking to document a player’s historic feat or an arcane trend in the game.

Hurd is drawn to stories of human spirit, especially those from the Negro League era, and to children’s literature about baseball and its surprisingly adult themes such as racism.

Mabray “Doc” Kountze was different than most sportswriters. Although he was the first African-American to receive press credentials from the Boston Red Sox, in 1934, he rarely chronicled the home runs and shutouts of Fenway Park ballgames. He chose to use his journalistic platform to try to advance larger causes in sport and society, most notably ending the exclusion of black players from major-league rosters.

So, when Hurd’s research into segregation-era pro baseball revealed Kountze as one of the most influential black sportswriters of the time, he had to learn more about him — especially since Hurd lives barely a mile away from the Jerome Street home in which Kountze did most of his writing.

“As I learned more about the black press journalists, it really woke up in me that there was another story there in Doc Kountze,” Hurd said. “I was really intrigued by what this man had to write and how he became a driving force in the integration of baseball in the major leagues.”

The result was the research paper, “Mabray ‘Doc’ Kountze: The First Black Journalist to be Issued a Press Pass by the Boston Red Sox,” which Hurd presented last summer at the 24th Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.

It was the third Hall of Fame presentation by Hurd, a retired Harvard University librarian and now a museum interpreter/educator at the Concord Museum.

Hurd will give a talk on his Kountze research at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 21, at the Medford Historical Society, 10 Governors Ave., where he is a board member. The talk is free and open to the public.

Born in 1910, Kountze began a 50-year career in journalism while he was a student at Medford High School. Lacking the physical stature to star on the athletic fields like his brothers, he utilized his ability to write and draw to stay close to the action.

He submitted cartoons to the Associated Negro Press that were compared favorably to those of Gene Mack, the well-known Boston sports cartoonist who was also from Medford. Kountze also illustrated posters to publicize local black baseball teams, including the West Medford Independents and served as a league scheduler and record-keeper.

By his early 20s, Kountze’s byline was appearing over sports articles in the “Boston Chronicle,” a black newspaper, and also was published in the “Chicago Defender.” He created an association of sports editors from black newspapers around the country who raised the profile of black athletes by selecting and publicizing college All-America and All-Star teams.

“Their single goal was to make the white press aware of the black athlete,” wrote noted baseball author and historian Glenn Stout, who knew Kountze as a mentor and friend. “Doc was convinced that once . . . the veneer of silence about the black athlete was broken in the white press, the major-league color barrier would be similarly breeched. He committed himself to the cause of the black ballplayer.”

In Boston, Kountze, at just age 25, held a series of meetings with front-office officials from the Red Sox and Braves to make the case to integrate their rosters. He knew first-hand of many outstanding players on semi-pro black baseball teams right around Boston who were worthy of tryouts.

But Kountze was politely, but firmly rebuffed. Unfazed and undeterred, he continued to press the case in print and among his fellow black journalists for another decade.

In 1945, with the help of Boston City Councilor Isadore Muchnick — who had threatened to end the Red Sox’s Blue Law exemption to play Sunday games at Fenway unless they started to consider black players — Kountze helped arrange the often-called bogus tryout the Red Sox held for black players Jackie Robinson, Sam Jethro and Marvin Williams.

After the brief workout at Fenway Park, which Kountze kindly described as “insincere,” the team declined to offer any of the players a contract — an act that would help burnish its reputation of institutional racism for decades.

Two years later, future Hall of Famer Robinson broke the color barrier by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers; in 1950, Jethro became the Braves’ first black signee and the National League Rookie of the Year. It would be another nine years before the Red Sox signed a black player — the last big-league team to do so.

Hurd marvels at the fortitude Kountze, who Stout called “one of the more significant and important sportswriters this nation has ever produced” and a man of “magnanimous spirit and commitment.”

“People ask me why Doc Kountze was the first black journalist to receive a press pass from the Red Sox,” Hurd said. “It may be because he was the only one bold enough to request one back then. He was a staunch supporter of integration and he took a bold stand on it, even though not everybody in the Negro Leagues and not every black journalist supported integration at that time.”

Kountze’s life story also resonated with Hurd as he performed his research, which included interviewing several of Doc’s relatives and friends, including Stout. He learned of the Kountze family’s deep roots in the historic African-American community of West Medford, one of the oldest in the nation, and also his lineage to Virginia slaves.

He read Kountze’s epic book on Medford and African-American history, “This Is Your Heritage,” and his sportswriting memoir, “50 Sports Years Along Memory Lane,” which has rare first-person accounts of the black press’s efforts to integrate baseball.

“He was a force in the community and had a major impact on the city, especially its children,” Hurd said. “They felt Doc was someone they could go to talk to and he always encouraged them to do something meaningful with their lives. He was a strong advocate for education, community, civic pride and civic responsibility. That struck me in terms of how I look at the spirituality of baseball and its enduring, positive foundations.”

Hurd is similarly inspired by children’s baseball literature, much of which is about the Negro League era of the 1920s and ’30s and the early days of re-integrated baseball (the majors had been all-white since 1884).

“It talks about prejudice, segregation and hate — pretty powerful stuff for a kids’ book — but also about the courage, determination, drive, and what I call the human spirit that allowed these men to put up with horrible abuse to go out and play what we regard as a game,” Hurd said.

Kountze, who died in 1994, probably would have some of those books on the shelf to share with a youngster who stopped by to chat.

“Doc once said that he associated with the Negro League players and coaches at the ground level and not high up in the press boxes,” Hurd said.

Kountze was presented the Griot Award from Boston College for perpetuating oral tradition and history, and the organization, Medford Arts Center Inc., holds art and film festivals named in his honor. But there is nothing about Kountze in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, save for now Hurd’s paper.

“The seminal role of Doc Kountze and other members of the [black sports editors association] in the eventual breakdown of the color line has never been adequately acknowledged,” wrote Stout, who for 20 years has edited the annual book “Best American Sports Writing.” “In my mind, sports writing, at its very best, is best represented by this man.”

Hurd also feels Kountze’s contributions are unknown to many in Medford — especially in local baseball circles and among the city’s youth. He is trying to change that.

“Doc is someone I feel people in Medford need to know about,” Hurd said, “and someone I feel very privileged to talk about.”